How We Got Our Site to 1,000+ Organic Search Clicks a Month

No one knows you exist.

You built a website? Great. Who’s visiting?

Often, no one. We had (have) this same problem. The web is a glut of websites. How did you even get here?

We built our site from practically zero organic search traffic to more than 1,000 clicks with a very simple SEO plan.  

The big guys may not be impressed by 1,200 site clicks a month. But we’re not a big guy (yet!) and many of our clients and prospects come to us in the same position. They ask, “How can we get awareness that we exist without delegating an enormous advertising budget?”

Here’s what it looked like:

We did it for us, and we can do it for you.

Here’s exactly how we increased organic search traffic without spending a dime on paid search or advertising:

SEO research

One cannot simply buy organic website traffic. By definition, paying for traffic by default is “paid” and not “organic.” So to increase actual organic traffic, you have to do research.

Knowing we wanted to increase our organic keyword rankings, we first mapped out our landscape. What keywords were our competitors ranking for? Where was there overlap with what we could rank for, and what was the difficulty for each keyword?

We used SEMRush to research keywords we wanted to rank for, and noted the difficulty of ranking for each one. 

Our primary indicator was keyword difficulty. It’s important to note that ranking for easier keywords first allows you to build domain authority, which will make it easier to gain a foothold for high-difficulty keywords.

Take a look at the keyword “How to generate traffic”:

Difficulty assesses how hard it would be to rank in the top 10 Google search results. The closer to 100 you get, the harder it is to rank in the top 10. 

Shockingly, the website that currently ranks number one for “how to generate traffic” is not a behemoth like Hubspot or Wordstream; it’s a marketing agency. 

Their page didn’t even exist until April of 2022 but somehow ranks above the giants. 

This is phenomenal and proves that an uncomplicated SEO strategy can work for you, too.

(Note that there are a number of factors that dictate how effectively and quickly you can rank high in Google. It’s a mix of domain authority, keyword optimization, meta descriptions, and backlinks.) 

Prioritize and cluster keywords

Once we had a comprehensive list of words in our competitive landscape and the low-difficulty keywords that would help us rank, we grouped the keywords into clusters. 

We noticed that keywords around “key messaging” were in our wheelhouse and ripe for the picking in terms of difficulty. We built out a cluster of topic keywords that related to key messaging and then got to work on some blog content. 

Pro tip: Choose keywords that were highly relevant to our business. You don’t want to pick keywords that are easy to rank for but have nothing to do with you, otherwise, you’ll end up with a bunch of traffic that gets you bupkiss. 

Publish, then publish again

Before we embarked on our SEO plan, we posted a blog post about key messaging in September of 2021. It went nowhere.

In March of 2022, we published a new, keyword-optimized blog post about key messaging. And then, we did nothing. Just posted it and moved on to other content.

Over the two or so years we’ve been in business, we’ve accumulated more rankings in the top 4-6 and the top 1-3. And that’s increased our domain authority. 

It’s important to note that the post is actually helpful. No keyword stuffing or shady gaming. Just strong content in our area of expertise built around a specific keyword. 

Link baby, link

A big part of accelerating your authority and rankings has to do with links. Backlinks are part of it, and that’s a tougher game to play, though it’s logical that the more visible your blog post is, the more likely someone will link to it on their own site.

It’s also important that you link within your site. That’s why we created two more posts about key messaging strategy and key messaging mistakes. We could link them all to each other and prove to Google that our top-performing article was part of a pattern of high-quality, topically related content. 

We also made sure to mention key messaging in other posts we wrote, like why listing features isn’t enough to get conversions.

(And you’ll notice I’m doing this in this very post, linking to our other posts that are related to this one. Meta!) 

How we can replicate SEO success for you

The best thing is that this process is replicable. It’s not specific to our industry or our keywords; we can build around any topic.

We first learn about your product and target audience, then identify your key messaging and positioning. That ensures we look for the correct kinds of keywords that will bring the right traffic to your site. 

Then we research your competitors and the market landscape to identify specific keywords to pursue, put them into clusters, and start creating content. We easily produce at least one blog post a week for our clients, which means that you'll see results only a few weeks after we set a strategy. 

Here’s some proof: We started working with a tech client in February of 2022. Because they just wanted content and they wanted it fast, they opted to forgo a strategy similar to what we implemented. But with our own SEO know-how, we still grew them from ranking for a few dozen keywords to ranking for 150 keywords.

Do they hit the first page in organic search results? No. Could they? Absolutely. 

This is where having the patience to create a strategy will pay off in the longer term. We helped them rank without specifying keywords or even trying. And still, the growth continues. 

Imagine what a strategy could do for you. 

Imagine getting an email like this from Google in a few months:

The more you rank for, the easier it is to rank for other topics. 

Strategy is the most important piece of the puzzle to driving organic traffic. Writing about whatever you want to say whenever you want to say it will not net meaningful results. SEO is not a game of luck or chance, it’s a game of planning and implementation. 

It’s also a game of consistency. And consistency is hard; we try to get a blog post on the Edify blog every week and that doesn’t always happen. But when we write a post, there is always an intention and always part of a plan. 

Crafting a plan and sticking to it takes time on the front end, but as you can see from our results, it doesn’t take long to pay off on the back end. 

Want us to create this plan for your business? Learn about the content strategies we create and implement for our clients.